6. “Magic is My Business”: Raymond Chandler and Detective Fiction as Modern Fairy Tale

Golden age detective fiction of the interwar period, from the “cozy” mystery tradition in Great Britain to the “hard boiled” private eye genre in the United States, is usually understood as focusing on rational puzzles that readers are encouraged to solve alongside the detective. In this regard, interwar detective fiction seemed to exemplify the “disenchantment of the world” that sociologists like Max Weber attributed to Western modernity. Yet contemporary mystery writers, critics, and readers also defined detective fiction as a form of fairy tale, folklore, or archetypal myth. Using the life and works of the American-born, English-educated writer Raymond Chandler as a case study, this essay argues that golden age detective fiction critiqued the modern ideals of science and reason as often as it extolled them. Interwar crime novels should be seen as an important expression of the re-enchantment of the world, based on the longer tradition within this genre—notably in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle—of combining the Enlightenment's stress on reason with Romanticism’s valorization of the imagination.